Once there, there's not much preventing them from coming across people bullying others, spreading hate speech, defrauding, spamming, and committing other online crimes.

Now, it looks like Facebook's got plans to let kids sign up, with parental authorisation, as opposed to just slipping through the cracks by lying about their age.

The site's filed a patent application, made public on Thursday, for a system that lets children create accounts with parental supervision.

This means, of course, that Facebook may well be on the brink of extending membership to kids under 13.

Here's the patent abstract:

When a user having an age less than a threshold age (a child user) attempts to access an online service or perform actions using the online service, the online service obtains parental authorization from an additional user having a parental relationship to the user. The child user may identify the user having the parental relationship and the online service verifies the validity of the identified user's account, the age of the identified user, and/or a connection between the identified user and the child user having a parental relationship type. The online service may make these verifications based in part social and transactional information associated with the identified user's account. Upon successful verification, the online service allows the identified user to authorize account creation for the child user, and/or manage the account and actions of the child user.

In other words, Facebook's patent application includes plans to let a parent (or somebody in a parental role) manage what a child does on the site.

That could include setting privacy controls, limiting and monitoring content type, and controlling who a child befriends and what third-party applications they interact with.

Mind you, this is not the first time Facebook's made moves to welcome children into the fold.

A spokesman told Politico that the patent application was first filed in 2012.

It's not a sure thing, he said, given that a patent application "is not a predictor of future work in this area."

But the patent application does point to Facebook's ongoing efforts to keep kids safe online, he said:

Child safety advocates, policymakers and companies have discussed how best to help parents keep their kids safe online. Like any responsible company, we looked at ways to tackle this issue.

Julia Horowitz, a consumer protection counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Politico that it's tough enough to keep kids from talking to strangers in the street, let alone when they plop down in front of computers where they could well be approached, groomed for abuse and victimised:

It seems like it's hard enough for parents to tell kids, 'Don’t tell strangers what your name is.' Then you put them in front of a computer, and ask them to make decisions about what information to share. That's an adult level of discretion that's unreasonable to ask of children.

I agree.

But the truth of the matter is that children are, in fact, now on Facebook, with or without parental oversight. They won't stop getting on there, regardless of whether or not Facebook is kept from straightforwardly accepting preteen members.

Once they're there, bad things can happen. Naked Security reports on children being cyberbullied or groomed by paedophiles via Facebook and subsequently sexually abused to a sickening degree.

Will a Facebook-created preteen signup mitigate any of those horrors?

As it is, in November the FTC shot down a proposed verifiable parental consent method submitted by AssertID under COPPA.

It's damn hard to verify that somebody who says they're a parent is actually, in fact, a parent.

In fact, the agency pointed out, Facebook's own 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates it has approximately 83 million fake accounts, which represents about 8.7% of its users.

More work obviously needs to be done on methods of verifying ID.

In the meantime, Facebook has been making good efforts at cleaning up the slimiest corners of Facelandia.

Up until last year, when Facebook finally decided that rape jokes and gender hate speech weren't creating what you might call a family-friendly atmosphere, you could find pages that extolled some pretty unsavoury stuff, including rapes and the rape drug Rohypnol.

Those pages are now part of Facebook history.

Facebook has also been doing great work with anti-bullying efforts, including working with Yale University's Center for Emotional Intelligence in its efforts to tweak language and methods on its report abuse function - efforts that came with new tools for bullying victims in a recently rolled out Bullying Prevention Centre for the UK and Europe.

That's a start. If children are going to be directly courted in the future, let's hope those efforts get ever stronger.

Facebook needs to find ways to cut child predators off before they groom victims, for example.

Parents, what else do you want to see Facebook work on before it rolls out the red carpet for your kids? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

4 Responses to Is Facebook coming for your kids?

well....for a start Facebook might start putting their privacy settings for kids in plain language. And they might make them simpler. Privacy settings in Facebook are so complex that they take an expert to sort out what they mean and decide if they need to be turned off or on. If Facebook do open up for kids, they need to prevent kids from "liking" pages, due to the amount of Fake pages set up to lure kids in to liking them and then have them victimised via direct messaging from the person that set up the fake page. They need to limit the amount of profiles a child can set up, seeing as the most popular form of bullying right now online is by kids setting up Fake profiles of the victim in order to bully them and humiliate them. They need to make sure that kids cannot be messaged by any adult that is not related to them, or anyone they really don't know. They need to restrict the amount of friends kids have, so that they are less likely to accept friend requests from people they really don't know well. I'd say that allowing kids on Facebook will be impossible to do with the model they have right now, as all other kid friendly online games and platforms require online real time moderation. Unless you can have real time adult trusted moderation having kids on Facebook will be a recipe for disaster. Having parents as moderators will only work if parents pay attention to what their kids are doing online, and so many parents simply don't set aside time to check up.

As FB is not happy enough mining and profiting from the information of this generation, they want to start capturing the details of the next so that they could intrude further into the lives or more. While using the words 'FB' and 'privacy' in the same sentence is laughable, I wonder what the little ones want to post on their wall? "Successfully completed my potty training and now I am licensed to use it by myself" or "10th diaper soiled for today with many more to go... #angrymommy"

This is not good regardless. Why cant kids just be active with sports or play outside like our younger generations. What is this world coming too. All I see are kids walking around with ipads or tablets when they are out with families. Why cant they just enjoy the moment? So sad what is happening. In a world where a data breach, compromise, hack is an everyday occurrence, why put yourself or child in that kind of exposure.

About the author

I've been writing about technology, careers, science and health since 1995. I rose to the lofty heights of Executive Editor for eWEEK, popped out with the 2008 crash, joined the freelancer economy, and am still writing for my beloved peeps at places like Sophos's Naked Security, CIO Mag, ComputerWorld, PC Mag, IT Expert Voice, Software Quality Connection, Time, and the US and British editions of HP's Input/Output. I respond to cash and spicy sites, so don't be shy.